I was sitting at a Swedish restaurant in Chicago, across from my friend Christine. We'd been looking at apartments together for a couple of weeks, and had settled on one in Andersonville, Chicago, which was where all the lesbians used to live. It had a pyramid shaped bathroom and a living room with 14 foot ceilings. I pressed a meatball into the plate with the bottom of my fork and watched it ooze through the tines. My head hurt and I was afraid of something.
Chris and I had a weird friendship. We'd made out a few times, but she'd had problems getting rid of a psycho-alchoholic boyfriend of hers. About six months earlier, while I was getting evicted from an apartment that I'd shared with my ex-wife, he'd shown up at my door with a loaded revolver and threatened to kill me if I ever talked to Chris again. With a coolness that I've not been able to summon since, I asked him if I could buy him a drink so we could talk things over. Ten minutes later we were at the bar downstairs, laughing over shots of tequila. He thought it was hardcore that I didn't use a lime or salt. I thought it was disgusting, but it was very important in those days that I zen my way through these sorts of situations, bending like a reed in the wind, accepting murderous psychosis and rolling it over with a few drinks and a dirty joke about old ladies.
I don't know what I'll do if it happens to me again.
Chris was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen. We met at the restaurant where she worked, which was one of those overpriced places that sold a lot of soft shell crab. I can't remember why I was there, but when I saw her standing behind a beer-tub in a little black dress... she was too much of a person to be where she was. She had intensity. I was too shy to say anything to her that night, so I just sat by the window drinking my Red Death, making off with quick glances at her unbelievable face. Then she looked right at me. I vomited a little in my mouth. I knocked my drink over. I fell sideways out of my chair and hit the floor. I picked myself up and straightened my half-tucked shirt and summoned a suave smile in her direction. The face she made as she tried very hard not to laugh was more beautiful than the one before it, so I beat it the hell out of there before I fell down again.
I went back the next night, and she was bar tending. I ordered a drink and a small dinner at the bar, so I'd have a chance to talk to her, but she was too busy to do much besides clear up the mess after my meal, so I spent my time there just watching her. She got watched a lot. Everyone at the bar was doing the same thing I was; getting lost in that face of hers...
She had short black hair and green eyes, pale ivory skin, and when she smiled it looked as if she wasn't from this planet. I fell in love with her, though she never knew it, sitting at the bar over the next few months, eventually talking to her and getting to know her well. We were friends then and hung out a lot, mostly getting high in her apartment and then getting lost looking for the coffee shop on the corner. We didn't agree on anything, but we didn't really have arguments. We'd get lost in each other's opinions, exploring them and savoring them, not once feeling threatened by them. It was better that we didn't agree on anything, you dig? We went so much further, so much deeper than we would if we'd been a very similar kind of person. She was alien and I craved it; so perfectly different from me.
We sat at Ann Sathers, the Swedish restaurant, and I was mashing my meatball into the plate. I think she loved me the way I loved her then. She was always exploring my face and touching my hands, and she'd make a tiny humming sound when she smiled at me. We had the apartment, and the only thing for it then was paying the landlord to move in. We hadn't done that yet.
I was afraid. Everything started crashing around me suddenly as I squashed my meatball, her ex boyfriend and his revolver, my divorce and eviction, my new job that I still wasn't very good at, hating Chicago and everything in it except Chris...
I broke her heart. I told her I didn't know why I couldn't move in with her, but that I just couldn't do it. At the time it felt like moving in with her was a harbinger of death. Something about it left me cold and terrified. I felt as if moving in with her would be the worst of all possible decisions, so I told her then and there.
I don't blame her for slapping me, and it was the last time I saw her.
Now that more than twelve years have gone by, I think I know why I was so afraid. I was at a turning point in my life in that moment at the restaurant with Chris, and the decision I made in that moment would permanently change the course of my life. The terror I felt was of the unknown, see? And I had a decision to make. And I made it. And now, after more than sixteen years, I realize that I made the wrong one.
Imagine erasing twelve years and putting something else in its place.
Not one thing leading up to having my brain electrocuted in the basement of a hospital in Massachusetts would have happened. And nothing after that, either.
Next time, turn left.
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